


Rooftop Trauma

by Batastic_Grayson



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Batfamily Feels, Brothers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Healing, Multi, Murder, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Rape/Non-con Elements, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 13:31:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15909231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batastic_Grayson/pseuds/Batastic_Grayson
Summary: Nightwing and Tarantula work together to take down Blockbuster, but Tarantula has ulterior motives. Injured, confused, and vulnerable--she takes advantage. Dick is left to pick up the pieces the morning after.





	Rooftop Trauma

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for physical violence, rape, murder, molestation, etc. The circumstances surrounding Dick Grayson's rape are founded in canon, but I adjusted them a little bit to suit my own needs. I also added in Jason as a supportive measure towards the end.

**_Dick_ **

 

            Pain.

            It’s my first impression upon waking. A persistent, dull ache pulsing through my limbs, my chest, my abdomen. It starts off hazy, like my thoughts, slow and even merciful. But it grows as the light of early dawn finds me, and I close my eyes tightly against the pale fingers of sun that crawl across my bedspread. My palms find their ways to my eyes, and I press hard to try and smother the headache now gaining strength.

            Moving brings new pains, and I wince at the sharp reminder of a blade slipped between my ribs last night. I press a hand to my side, feeling the patch of dried blood circling the wound hastily patched with gauze. Further study shows that I have several other wounds, most unbandaged, as if I just stumbled into bed without bothering to clean up. My sheets are riddled with mud and blood stains, dried rain water and brackish dirt. Remnants of rooftop scuffles.

            I roll away from the light trying to push its way into the darkened bedroom, forcing myself to draw in a grounding breath past a broken collar bone I recognize throbbing into my shoulder. My head spins when I sit up, likely from blood loss. I try to push myself from the mattress, but pain like a cattle prod races up my leg applying any weight, and I collapse back onto the edge of the mattress with a stifled yelp. I’ve dislocated something, a knee maybe, and it takes several moments for me to remember how I even sustained my injuries.

            It’s all a bit of a blur. Rain. The rapport of knuckles on flesh. The gleam of a blade. Taunting words. Stomach acid.

            I’d finally tracked down Blockbuster, finally seen that sick bastard face to face, and we’d fought. I remember that much. It had been bloody, painful, perhaps a harsher ass-kicking than I normally would sustain because I had been distracted. I feel a dip of pain capture my middle at the flash of memory, a circus tent dissolving into flames amidst the downpour, and I have to school the flare of anger that engulfs me for a few moments. He’d destroyed the last place I’d seen my parents. The last place we’d ever held each other and laughed, spoken, danced, lived.

            Blockbuster had burned my parents’ graves. And he’d done it with a smile.

            I push myself again to my feet, this time avoiding weight on my left leg, and I limp to the bathroom with a grimace curling my lip. My shoulder screams with pain when I lean against the doorway for a rest, and I briefly consider trying to call Alfred for help. But when I glance back at my bedroom, the bloodied clothes discarded across the floor in the shadows of night, a dark shame I’ve never felt before twists in my stomach. I turn back to the shadows of the bathroom, catching my reflection silhouetted and hunched. I don’t want him to see me like this.

            God, I was stupid. Hurt and reckless and angry.

            I’d attacked Blockbuster like I’ve never attacked anyone before. The memories are surfacing like waves washing sand from a shipwreck now, and I’m overwhelmed again with guilt. I’ve never wanted to kill someone like that, not since Joker, but I had certainly tried. I’d torn him to pieces, as best as I could, but I’d been sloppy. Emotional and too invested. He’d gotten in one too many shots, and he’d been pretty damn close to escaping again. His next stop was the manor, to finish off my family. He wanted me alive, he said, so I would find their bodies when he was finished.

            His threat had been too much.

            I shudder as his last images flutters through my mind, limping further into the bathroom. I open the medicine cabinet above the sink, trying to avoid the hollow eyes that meet mine in the reflection briefly. I take down a bottle of oxycontin from my last severe injury, and I swallow a few dry. When I close the cabinet, and my mirror images shutters back into existence, I find myself staring at him blankly.

            Last night is losing its haze slowly, probably the effects of field morphine wearing off, and I close my eyes when another piece of the puzzle clicks into place. I remember now.

            I’d teamed up with Tarantula last night out of desperation. She wasn’t an ideal partner, but she was someone. Cruel, untested, extreme…but someone willing to help. She’d been available and that was more than any others were…but I had never expected she’d go so far as to _kill_ Blockbuster, or that I would let her. Relish in it even.

            But I did. I stood aside as she murdered someone. No trial, no justice. Just cold, hard revenge.

            My stomach turns when I picture the pallor he’d adopted in death, and it’s hard not to remember the sickly-sweet smile she’d given when she’d tossed his body down and turned to face me. His corpse looked like a wax figurine, unnaturally twisted against rooftop trash and brick. My satisfaction had abruptly turned to illness, to a guilt so deep it threatened to swallow me, and I’d stumbled away from her and the body.

            An echo of my thoughts mumbles through my mind. I’d been thinking about Bruce. How disappointed he would be in me. How I’d broken the only rule I’d ever wanted to follow, and now I would have to live with that for the rest of my life. The rain in Gotham washed away a lot of evidence over time, but it only made me feel more filthy.

            My reflection’s expression shifts, his eyes ringed by dark circles, his color pale when he regards me in disdain. I close my eyes against him, trying to focus on finishing the chain of memories. I have to catalog them, to sort through them and figure out what happened last night, so I can forget them again. It’s what I do after every mission, every hazy night. I analyze, discard, repeat. Bruce once told me it’s the only way to stay sane in this line of work.

            I expect my memories to tell me I left the rooftop after we killed Blockbuster, that I slipped away to my bike and rode home. That I collapsed into bed, too ashamed and exhausted to do anything but administer the emergency morphine and fall into a fitful sleep. It would make the most sense. Be the most the plausible.

            So I’m surprised when my mind’s eye lingers on the rooftop, and my memories begin to sharpen into the ice cold points, like needles pricking my skin. The rain was cold against my wounds. I was bleeding more than was safe, but I wasn’t in a good frame of mind to do anything about it. I can still hear my thoughts rattling around my skull, smell the fire of my parents’ graves in my nose, feel someone else’s blood on my hands. Guilt, so heavy, bowing my shoulders inwards. I’d wanted to die.

            Tarantula, she’d been there too, I realize. She had put a hand on my shoulder and said something. I don’t remember what, my blood had been rushing in my ears too loudly. My hands had started to shake at that point. I was going into shock. My whole frame was shivering, breath sobbing in and out of my lungs, thoughts scattering around new pains and nausea curling in my stomach. I’d sat down on the ground, trying to regain my grounding past my rapidly beating heart, trying to reach for my phone to call Alfred. I needed help.

            I realize my hands are trembling again on the countertop, gripping it so hard my knuckles are aching, but I can’t loosen their grip. The memories are washing over me like river water now, jarring to my system, incongruent with the fiction of simply going home. I hadn’t gone home, because she’d stopped me. She’d taken the phone from my hands and pushed me back onto the wet concrete of the rooftop with firm hands. My memory of her face is blurry above, obscured by rain, but she’d taken her mask off. She was looking at me, saying something with a smile and dark eyes.

            I was shaking so badly, my vision gapping in areas, dark in others, that I didn’t stop her when she was kissing me suddenly. Her mouth tasted salty from my tears, her hands insistent as she leaned onto my chest. I didn’t want this, and I tried to say it past her mouth. Tried to scream it, but my voice was paper thin when I said no. I was a paper doll, helpless to her will. My vision had winked out completely for a few moments when she put pressure against my broken collar bone, and nausea cramped my stomach violently when she started to pull at my belt.

            I try to pull from the memory now, try to close the walls that were surrounding it with ignorance, but the vision of Tarantula sitting on me burns into my eyes even when I close them. I remember the next moments sharply, painfully, because I tried to push her off. I told her not to touch me. I tried to crawl away from her greedy hands and her rough mouth, but I was weak from blood loss.

            Shock was rapidly turning into near unconsciousness, but I was awake when she took me. I couldn’t move, but I remember vomiting up stomach acid at some point when she braced a hand against my ribs roughly. My eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer and all I could do was surrender. She still moved against me, present even as I slipped in and out of consciousness. When she was finished an eternity later, she’d climbed off me with a cooed sound of satisfaction, blown me a kiss, and slipped away into the rain.

            I don’t remember exactly how I got home after that. A blur of street lights, morphine quick vials, and a stolen taxi flicker through my mind on a slow reel. I remember vaguely pressing bandages with blood slicked hands, stumbling upstairs, before I’d lost consciousness trying to get in bed.

            The denial is first to come, and it settles over my shoulders like a damp blanket. I hold onto it for a moment, gripping the hem to keep as a child does a parent, but it isn’t long before reality tears it away from me and I’m left to view last night with wide open eyes.

            Shame, dark and staining like tar, pools in my stomach, and I fight a residual wave of nausea as it threatens to eclipse me. I lean heavy against the counter, trembling, for a few minutes as I try to regain my footing. My legs feel weak, perilously unstable, as my mind fights to categorize the blame. But the images are all in grey and inabsolutes, and it’s hard to distinguish where my shame ends and my despair begins. They meld into each other, ice meeting fire, and I burn quietly.

            It’s several minutes of standing in the silence of the bathroom until I’m able to move again, able to think past the tumult of emotion, and I limp back towards my bed. I need medical attention, but not from Alfred. I find my phone on my way to the mattress, and I don’t think much before I’m typing out a disjointed message to the only person I can bear to have see me right now.

 

**_Jason_ **

           

            I get his text at five, when the sun is not yet awake and the house is still, before even Alfred’s made it to the kitchen for his morning tea. The fact that he texts me, and not Alfred, makes me walk quickly as I hasten to Dick’s room. He wouldn’t ask me for help, not unless it’s bad.

           I find him in his bedroom, buried in a pile of muddied blankets and looking like he’s battled death itself. His eyes are a hollow blue that frankly scares me, and he doesn’t say anything when I stop at the side of his bed and offer him a hand. He flinches when I touch him, but accepts it. I lever him up quietly, working to hide my shock when I survey his condition. He’s covered in cuts and bruises spreading like purple flowers over his waxy skin, but I don’t ask how he got them as I help him out of bed and into the bathroom. He’s coated in a fine layer of dirt and soiled bandages, and it’s an unspoken agreement when I help him into the shower and he starts washing away the grime.

            I leave the bathroom door open in case he falls, and I set about levelling Dick’s shattered world again. I throw the dirty clothes into the hamper, change the sheets on his bed, lay out sweats and a t-shirt. I gather bandages, alcohol swabs, needle and thread. I force the chaotic room back into normalcy, and I try to ignore the amount of morphine quick vials I find. Most of all, I try not to picture what compelled Dick to text me and not anyone else.

            Why am I uniquely qualified?

            I hear the shower turn off a few minutes later, and we both remain silent when I help him from the shower and he limps back to the bed. His skin is red and chafed from scrubbing, but I don’t mention it. I help him dress wordlessly, and I try to keep my eyes from the blank expression coloring his face. He’s never so quiet, and it sets my teeth on edge wondering why he is this morning. There’s no jokes, no puns, no thank yous. Just absolute silence.

            It scares me.

            I let him have the quiet though, because he told me not to ask in his text. He just needed help, he said. A bad night, he said.

            He grimaces when I settle him on the bed and begin bracing his arm. The most sound he makes is a slight yelp when I realign his knee. His color is still waxen when I stitch him up, but he remains otherwise wordless for the duration of me treating him. By the time I finish bandaging him, the sun has started to creep through the curtains. I close them when Dick turns away from the light, looking exhausted and grey, but at least better than when I found him.

            His silence extends even when I stop at the side of the bed again, still wearing my own pajamas, and I stare at him for more direction. His eyes sweep up to mine, pale grey instead of their usual sunny blue, and my chest tightens uncomfortably. He looks…small. So much smaller than he normally does. Broken in a way that feels reminiscent of my own pain, and he doesn’t have to say anything for me to know what happened. I remember looking at my own reflection with that kind of emptiness, thinking about what had been taken from me, feeling ashamed and hollowed of myself.

            It’s a haunting kind of look specific to rape, and I know it immediately.

            My throat tightens with anger and sorrow in equal parts, and I feel myself break my promise before I can stop myself with a murmured, “Do you want me to stay?”

            He looks away from me a moment, pain marking his usually carefree mouth ten years older, but eventually, he nods. It’s a quiet gesture, almost too small for me to see, but it’s enough. I slide into bed next to him, careful not to touch him. It’s Dick who moves closer, pressing his shoulder into mine silently, and he takes my hand with trembling fingers. We stay like this for several minutes, Dick holding my hand, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. I see tears slide sideways into the pillowcase, hear the slight hitch in his quiet breath as he cries, and I grip his hand tighter.

            The moment is absent of the usual reservation that comes with crying in front of a younger brother. There are no staring eyes here, no facades to uphold. We’re just Dick and Jason, the best of friends, the closest of brothers. We mourn together in the quiet stillness of the morning, and we don’t have to say anything. I feel his pain, hanging in the air above us, the same way he feels my own experience echoing back to him. It’s a bit like the feeling of leaves whispering together in autumn or clouds burying a sunrise. Beautiful, and yet tragic.

            Eventually, I hear Dick’s breath level out next to me, and I’m relieved when I look over and find him sleeping again. He needs it. The body heals with time, but the mind heals with sleep. It’s a lesson I’ve learned harshly, but it’s also a lesson I never thought Dick would have to learn. Anger coils around my heart again, hot and familiar as a branding iron, and I force myself to bury it for now. I will exact payment for what happened to Dick when the time is right, but for now, he needs my presence, not my rage.

            Someday, he’ll look at this morning and remember that he survived. He’ll remember that someone cared about him more than someone hurt him, and he’ll heal. Someday, he will be whole again, just as I am slowly learning to be whole again.

            I close my eyes against the dim ceiling above us, focusing on the flux of breath and the blood still thrumming through our veins. Eventually, the sound of steady breathing and the song of two heart beats, very much alive, lulls me to sleep as well.


End file.
